They’re driving us mad, we’re rolling our eyes and the Sharia paradox — my dispatch from the frontlines of modern madness

The slow road to nowhere

Have you been driven mad by this government yet? Let’s see if this news round-up takes you the extra mile.

Apparently the government is considering putting a levy on electric vehicles — a 3p-per-mile charge on top of other road taxes.

A government spokesperson told the BBC: ‘Fuel duty covers petrol and diesel, but there’s no equivalent for electric vehicles. We want a fairer system for all drivers.’

No one should be surprised. This has been the direction of travel for years. But let’s drop the pretence that this is about fairness.

You’re being nudged off the road. Slowly, deliberately, and without consent. This is radical incrementalism — sweeping change achieved through a series of small, almost imperceptible steps, each one seemingly reasonable on its own.

In the House of Lords report ‘In our hands: behaviour change for climate and environmental goals’, one proposal reads:

‘The measures that could dissuade private vehicle use include:
(a) changing rules on the use of roads, such as reduced speed limits, school streets, low-traffic neighbourhoods…
(b) road pricing, congestion charging, low emission zones, higher parking costs, workplace parking levies…’

That’s not about fairness. It’s about dissuasion. About behavioural control.

You achieve a radical end result with small steps. If they told you at the outset they wanted you to give up your car (one proposal even calls for a reduction of private car use by a fifth) you’d say no. So instead, you get the frog-boil version:
Congestion Charge → LEZ → ULEZ → Expanded ULEZ → Pay-per-mile proposals.

Remember when they said it was about cleaner air? It was about control.

Add on vast swathes of the country now driving at 20 miles an hour and LTNs and much more expensive parking. This is all about making driving inconvenient and costly. Driving used to feel like freedom and now it feels like friction.

And all of this has happened without ever stating the goal at the outset. No parliamentary debates. No transparency.

There are obvious ethical problems with governments using ‘nudge’. Nudge undermines free will. Changing people’s behaviour without their knowledge or consent should not be a pillar of modern government. If we keep allowing ourselves to be nudged towards a so-called ‘greater good’, we’ve given up on determining what good means.

We now live in a nudgocracy, not a democracy.

So what can we do about it?

First, don’t be surprised when you’re nudged inch by inch into a corner you didn’t choose. Learn to spot the tactics.

After writing A State of Fear, I asked the UK government to investigate its use of behavioural science. No luck. I asked the Covid Inquiry to include the use of fear and behavioural psychology in its remit. It didn’t.

The government is not your white knight. From tax compliance to vaccination to transport, behavioural science is now standard practice. Quite simply, your brain is a battlefield, it is disputed territory.

If you don’t want to be ‘nudged’ or, as arch-nudger David Halpern of the Behavioural Insights Team once said, ‘calibrated’, you must free your own mind.

Your cognitive shortcuts make you vulnerable to manipulation — conformity, authority, scarcity, ego, shame, fear, and more. The only defence is awareness. That’s why Patrick Fagan and I wrote Free Your Mind: the new world of manipulation and how to resist it.

(If you’ve read it and liked it, please consider leaving a review. It’s attracted some one-star reviews — from those unhappy that we dissected the propaganda around Net Zero, trans ideology and Covid. Sorry not sorry. They were excellent case studies.)

We’re all Martine Croxall

Do you find the news taking your breath away, day after day? I feel like a deflated party balloon, bobbing weakly across the floor. Are things really this bad? They seem to be.

BBC presenter Martine Croxall rolled her eyes for the nation when she read the scripted absurdity of the words ‘pregnant people’ before correcting herself with ‘women’.

Her intelligent improvisation sparked complaints, which the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit upheld. They said her facial expression gave the ‘strong impression of expressing a personal view on a controversial matter’.

Oh BBC, we’re all rolling our eyes with Martine.

Forget eye-rolling — the hypocrisy and bias at the BBC are eye-watering. The BBC doctored a Trump speech to make it appear he’d incited the Capitol riots. That goes far beyond impartiality, it is fiction with the intent to deceive.

And forcing presenters to say ‘pregnant people’ instead of ‘women’? That’s another lie we’re no longer willing to swallow.

The Sharia paradox

This week Adil Ray, TV presenter and Muslim, praised the election of Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New York, celebrating it with an approving nod to Sharia law.

But to those of us outside Islam, the heart of Sharia is clearly the exact opposite of social justice, welfare, fairness, charity and cohesion.

In many countries governed by Sharia, a woman’s testimony is worth half a man’s. Women inherit half what men do. Apostasy, blasphemy and same-sex relationships can still be punishable by death. Theft may be punished by amputation. Adultery by flogging or stoning.

It’s a strange peculiarity that apparently moderate Muslims, who have chosen to live in liberal democracies, will still profess admiration for laws that crush the very freedoms that allow them to do so. Sharia law causes people to flee those countries and yet some of it yearn for it once they are safe from it’s harsh grip.

That’s all for this week, signing off with a huge eye roll in solidarity!